The museum as a site for mediating experiences

This project aims to help advance theoretical and practical knowledge on digitally mediated museum visitors’ experiences. This aim is achieved through theoretical and empirical investigation of the ways in which visitor experiences are staged and emerge through interactions across visitor practices, analogue and digitally mediated exhibition elements and the museum site. In theoretical terms, the project draws on performances studies, theories of atmosphere and post-phenomenology. The Danish Castle Centre forms the locus of the empirical study which uncovers the qualities characterizing analogue and digitally mediated visitor experiences as these are formed through interaction between particular exhibition elements. We are particularly concerned to uncover whether these experiences can be seen to foster fragmentation or synergies in the museum visitors´ learning processes, in the social context of their visit and in the co-creation of experiences between the specific analogue museum site, experience-enhancing technologies and the exhibited artefacts.Project results are related to Our Museum’s overall analysis of museum dilemmas in balancing dimensions of enlightenment and entertainment and specific project results are of relevance to professional capacity-building when designing for technology-enhanced museum experiences.